E&E - SWS Logo

Check it out!

After speaking with Alex he drummed us up a nice little logo for SWS, it was only a quick thing for the time being, I'm sure there is a lot more branding that would need to be done on top of this but it gives us something to start with.

As for the plans now, I think that we have reahced the stage that we wanted to be at by this time. I'll speak with George and Dave through this week and we can start talking with some designers about templates. After this is we can then pull in some buisness and start trading!

Oh and we musn't forget to start organising a presentation for the final hand-in. So still some bits and bobs to do!

F-Sim Space Shuttle

Over the course of this lazy weekend I've found myself in possession of another addictive iPod game. It's called  F-Sim Space Shuttle, the idea is that you are the pilot of the Orbiter Space Shuttle during its final approach and landing into either the Edwards Airforce Base or the Kennedy Space Centre. 

Although it's an incredibly simple idea, the game is really well executed and is actually quite difficult. It's tied into Game Centre as well, which means that if I can persuade some of the others at college to get it then we can find out who the best Space Shuttle pilot is. I'll probably leave it a few weeks before I tell them, just so I can get a head-start! 

Anyway, download the game out here. Hopefully you'll end up getting as addicted as I'm becoming!

A Love Story . . . In Milk

Written by Stephen Follows and directed by Danann Breathnach, "A Love Story... In Milk" tells the story of two milk jugs who fell in love. He was 2 percent from Happy Farm, she was whole milk from Valley Dairy - still, they found happiness together. But it couldn't last forever.

As featured on Neatorama and The Daily What, this adorable video turns heartbreaking when one empty milk container is put in the recycling bin and the other is thrown in the trash. The unhappy ending is a strong message from Friends of the Earth, a UK organisation promoting recycling.

It's an incredibly clever video that not only anthropomorphises the two milk jugs, but successfully tells the story of their love through the use of clever visuals and sounds.

A Love Story… In Milk from Catsnake on Vimeo.

Reblogged via Syracuse's Viral Video of the Day

E&E - The Limitations Of Vimeo

Having attended yesterdays E&E lecture on freelancing I was drawn in by a couple of poignant points. One of the presenters detailed how many freelancers were beginning to post their showreels online and how employers now simply expected a link to content.

This struck a chord because although we are not yet focussing our attention on the freelance industry, the fact remains that many students will want to be moving their content onto a online platform for their job search. As a result our target market is starting to appear a lot more tangible. 

Many people are using Vimeo for their hosting, and the many reasons for using this service over YouTube can be found in a quick search of the web, the main points are that:

• Personal video usage - no inane comments
• High Quality video by default
• Adaptable video players
• Only recommendations to view your other videos at the end of a clip, rather than a selection of related videos from other users

Although these may appear as mundane reasons for the time being, the fact remains that many professionals are maiming Vimeo their platform of choice. The question that now is needs to be asked now is how are we going to incorporate this into our business. 

There is no way that we could set out to compete with any of these well established market players, and one of my pet hates is having very little interoperability between platforms (not being able to repost a blog on blogger/twitter for example). So we must be willing to help users embed their videos into their webpages or even look into developing a temporary video holding and hosting service for when they cannot upload to Vimeo but need to quickly make a showreel available (Basic package users are only allow 1 HD upload a week, on top of this they are only allowed 500MB of storage space a week).

What I'm getting at is, as resellers we need to have a basic awareness of the constraints and needs of our clients and be ready to adapt to and incorporate their problems into our core business and technical models. In the instance of video showreels this means knowing how to quickly embed and upload content on Vimeo, or maybe even have a premium account for the company ($59.95 a year) that we can then move the customers videos into while they either create their own account or merely as a one off solution. 

The added details on the added functionality of using VimeoPlus can be found here.

30 Day Routine Change

This was posted ages ago on Lifehacker and I finally got around to watching it last night. The main focus is on the short talk by Matt Cutts at a recent Google I/O event.

He details how having a daily routine is great for staying productive, organised and keeping the stress levels to a minimum, but it can also start to feel tiresome and repetitive after a while. The suggestion is to make a small change and try something new for 30 days, this helps you to refresh a dull routine and help you expand your routine in positive way.

Even small changes such as riding a bike to work or writing a page of a novel every day can provide a level of inspiration and excitement, without completely disrupting your daily routine.. The added benefit of making it a small activity is that it will be easily sustainable, however it can also be used to really help you discover a little bit more about yourself and improve upon your weaknesses in a steady, manageable way.

While having a daily routine will help you stay organized and productive, it can also start to feel tiresome after awhile, and it's easy to stop trying new things. Googler Matt Cutts says you can escape that by trying something new—even something small—for 30 days. Cutts explains how by adding or subtracting something simple from his daily routine, like riding his bike to work, or taking a photo every day, helped him expand his routine in positive ways without throwing a wrench into his daily organisation. It doesn't need to be anything huge, either. Something small is easily sustainable, and can still help make your time more memorable, and even help you learn a thing or two about yourself.

E&E - CSS Templates

I was just casually browsing earlier and looking for some inspiration when I came across this site which hosts and provides access to a large number of free CSS templates.

CSS is basically used to style webpages, what we could think of doing is maybe having a page like their one, where the templates are presented to the consumer and they can browse through the examples and test the functionality. SWS could then go further and maybe make it possible for the customer to select a template and then upload their photos and choose a simple colour scheme, almost in a Wordpress Theme kind of way. The customer is then provided with an output link which they can use to direct people to their portfolio. 

Of course this will require a lot more work and investment because it will need a login and online payment system along-side the templates page, but it would be well worth investigating this possibility for the future. Ease of use is a key factor in the marketability of our product.

E&E - Hosting Information

Here's a really interesting website listing most (if not all) of the UK's major hosting companies.

As the site explains it's already a fairly established market so we are going to have to work quite hard to come up with a really good USP. Will selling entirely to students be enough?

E&E - Online Presence

So we have begun to culture an online presence for Student Web Services. This began by firstly purchasing the domain name www.studentws.co.uk (this doesn't lead to a homepage at the moment). In that same vein we've also purchased some hosting so that we can start to offer our services out.

In terms of the more social media related side of things, there are new Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts for Student Web Services (usually appearing under the guise of StudentWS). Although it seems a little naive to say, these platforms really will help us to promote StudentWS amoungst our target market. 

I say it could be a little naive because I am well aware that simply moving an advertising/marketing strategy onto a social media platforms is never sufficient, these strategies have to change and interact cleverly in order to really make an impact. These initial steps will help us to keep people update and create an initial awareness during the first few weeks of our campaign.

E&E - cPanel

Here's a link to cPanel's website, initially we are thinking of using this CMS (Content Management System) for our customers because of it's ease of use for both the user and the administrator. 

Will the licensing costs be too much to warrant using this solution though? The next best step is probably to research what other solutions (if any!) are out there. 

E&E - Presentation Tomorrow

We've just received the timings for our formative presentations tomorrow. We are due to meet at 11:45 so as a group we have decided to come in at 10:00 to prepare. 

At the moment our plan is to talk through our general idea, then begin to explain some of the progress that we have made (researching hosting, cPanel and any possible market), after this we'll explain what the future holds for our enterprise. 

I think what we are going to find most interesting and useful will be the feedback that we get from the tutor, although our plans are making decent progress at the moment (I know from the look of this blog it doesn't look like we have been making progress!) but we've really made a start at this and it'll be great to take away any feedback we get and act upon it. I'll post up any results that we come up with!

E&E - Internet Access

Here's a link to the 2010 UK Internet Access survey which details households and individuals home access to the Internet and individuals’ use of the Internet across the UK.

These statistics show an increasing trend, with more and more people having access to and using the World Wide Web. This is vitally important for our proposed business venture which will rely on this continuing use to drive it's appeal and take-up.

E&E - Project Plan

Below is a copy of the Project Plan that we handed in for our E&E module this year. Our group (George Alton, Dave Christmas and myself) are planning on starting up a web hosting service designed specifically for the student market.

PROJECT PLAN

Name of enterprise:
No definite name yet, will probably develop into something along the lines of “Student Web Services”
Student name(s):
Craig Gardner
David Christmas
George Alton
Job roles to be decided

Summary of enterprise:
The business is to be based around providing online services to students. The prime focus would be those who need temporary hosting and design services during their time at University/College. This could be for a range of things from actual term-time projects (something like Rave Live) through to online portfolio hosting.

The primary focus at the beginning is students who need temporary online services at some point. To that end our major USP would be that we would not attempt to lock the customer down into lengthy contracts but simply provide the service on a month by month basis.

To supplement this we would look firstly into providing basic template solutions that require the minimal amount of effort from the client in order for them to have a functional website, this would mostly be used for basic portfolio presentation during the job application process. Taking this further we could offer more complex and involved hosting/design/technical support services to student start-ups and larger projects.

Finally we would develop an “after University” support section for  graduated students who wish to keep their services. This would be a major development once the original start-up was functioning and profitable.

Our mission statement would involve something along the lines of “we see ourselves providing personal, affordable and no ties web services to the student community. These can be tailored as little or as much as the clients require to help them achieve the best in their endeavours”

Measurable aim(s) of enterprise:

 The feeling at the moment is that there is still a vast amount of market research to be done around this endeavour, which could result in it changing form or direction. The next steps while this is taking place would be to find out the technical infrastructure requirements and begin promoting (at the very least) web design and consultancy services to student projects.

The monetary gains would be small at first, but by making our services highly attractive and affordable the natural flow of the student communications channels should do a lot for our promotion.

Using the fact that many E&E projects will also require websites we could promote the services in this community and hopefully gain some contacts/short term customers there. There is also the up -coming Penrose Media which will require a website etc, these are two examples within Ravensbourne, this idea could easily be pushed further a-field due to the geographically untied nature of the Internet.

A good figure would be 2 – 5 paying customers by the end of the project, spread over various services and at different levels of involvement (short term customers vs long term customers etc)

A starting point would be a website, moving through small-scale social media promotions (a Facebook group etc). The major driving force would be contacting people and making use of already established contacts to bring business and inherrently spread the word through their day-to-day conversations

Action Plan:
Basic Schedule (note this is to be drastically revisited once the final direction of the enterprise has been settled upon)
Weeks 1&2 – Market research, infrastructure research
Weeks 3&4 – Set up own website and hosting, (obtaining/investing in static IP etc) begin to refine portfolio design templates
Weeks 3 – 6 – Promote via word of mouth/online presence and begin arranging client meetings and working to provide the first stages of solutions
Weeks 6+ – Continue with progress, re-asses and re-evaluate enterprise direction and adjust project goals/progress plans accordingly

Budget:
Far to early to say at this stage. Dependant upon initial infrastructure outgoings vs client take-up. A more detailed budget will be drawn out once market research has been done and the project goals have been adjusted accordingly.

Exit Strategy/ Risk management:
Two weeks of market research and technical research will give us a better idea of what we would stand to lose. However as is usually the case with Web infrastructure, the entire thing can be built on older systems and then migrated over to newer systems once investment and uptake have reached appropriate levels. This should minimize the lost investment if the project were to fail during the first 6 weeks.

After this point, the focus should be on continuing student uptake (helped by the fact that every year there are more students entering education) and retaining graduates (this part of the enterprise can be worked on at around a 6month point of the first year, once the original project is seen to be effective).

Blog:
At Ravensbourne we have been required to keep several blogs for several different subjects. Along with my personal blog I have culminated them all at the following URL, this is where my E&E updates will go as well.

http://3rdyearengineering.blogspot.com

See You in Court - BBC

I've just finished watching an episode of BBC1's "See You in Court" which this week covered a couple of libel cases. The programme is actually really interesting, providing a good insight into the way that different parts of the UK's court system works. 

In this week's episode there were particular reference to the Libel Reform Campaign, which is a movement to oppose the silencing of journalists and science writers through libel litigation - a good thing in my view!

I thought that I'd post a couple of links up here just to raise some awareness and promote some interest. 

The Libel Reform Campaign  
See You in Court's programme page

Just as one final point, I'm trying to blog using BlogPress on my iPod, it seems to have worked out alright so far! Hopefully it'll mean I can blog a little bit more. 




 - Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone